Following a motorcycle accident earlier in the year I was left with a broken hand and shoulder, which, at the time, felt like a complete disaster but it forced me to stop and re-evaluate. Ponder. Reacquaint myself with some of the things I cherished and had forgotten. I dusted off the art books and took pleasure again in the paintings of Tapis, Morandi and Matisse... Delved into my CD collection from the 90s with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Tribe Called Quest and the Wonderstuff. So, with a few pads of paper in hand, I tried to relate to these things, the accident, the aftermath - and other simple things within my direct surroundings as inspiration for this new collection.

The endless lemons and onions I was unable to slice (Nemeses). The wagtails that nested in a wall in our garden, that I never saw for myself but romanced about a great deal. I whiled away the days, sitting in the bay window - partaking in a bit of low-key twitching. Making up new species of birds for my own pleasure and cooing over their nimbleness (and my lack of it). The paintings Honey and the Money and Hives relate to our neighbour's cottage industry of making local honey, which everyone raves about but, despite repeated attempts to try and acquire it, remains a mythical forbidden fruit.

Ivan Alvarado/Reuters

I also trawled through a mass of my most-recently acquired source material and found a curious photo taken from space by the astronaut, Tim Peake. Apparently, in the end he relied on social media to try and solve what exactly the photo depicted - a large man-made structure in the middle of a desert. It turned out to be a lithium farm. And the structure was, on closer inspection, a mass of large, open vats, full of varying and brilliantly-coloured lithium deposits, reminiscent of a fez tannery - if a little more hi-tech.